5-5

Voting

I was sitting in the parking lot outside the driver's license field office at 67 & Belt Line, and the guy next to me heard my husband and I discussing the hazmat endorsement on his Commercial Drivers License. Apparently Homeland Security is very involved with this, and makes truck drivers jump thru numerous hoops to get it ( plus big $). Anyway, we started talking about the 'state of the world' and the gentleman said he voted for Bush twice, but "the guy is the worst President we've ever had"!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I refrained from saying 'I told you so' but it was hard.
I had on my Edwards 'Support the Troops/End the War' shirt and he said he agreed - and added as a corollary that Bush had run up more debt than any other president. The guy also got all worked up on the immigration bill - Bush's support for immigrants over the opposition of the Republican base. I didn't go into it, I think the bill is fine. I mean, do people actually think 12 million immigrants are going to leave our country because we pass a bill?
When my husband worked in Austin and supervised 3 crews of men from Zacatecas, (in 1984) they went home every November, and were saving to buy land in Mexico. Now the men can't afford to risk going home, so they bring their families here. Personally, I'd like to see a Constitutional amendment revoking the 14th Amendment, so that only people whose parents are citizens can be US citizens. We are one of a few countries who allow the people born here to be citizens. In the majority of countries the law of 'jus sanguinis' is followed - you have to be the child of a citizen.
Would that make a difference? Quien sabe? But it's a start.

Elizabeth Edwards attempts to engage Ann Coulter, the skinny android from Outer Space, during a taping of Hardball.

5-4

It's official - Jesus can't do bong hits, and students can't suggest he should. But in case you think that only students got the shaft, read Slate's version of the decisions, most importantly this part:

The Chief Justice wrote the majority opinions in both of them and he read them one after the other this morning. What you won't catch in the opinions themselves was Roberts' little verbal segue between the two. First, in Morse he acknowledged that the student message on the banner was both "cryptic," yet also clearly advocacy of a "pro-drug" message, which a school principal can properly suppress. Then he slid smoothly into WRTL by distinguishing the student speech in Morse from what he called the "core political speech" of the Wisconsin pro-life group. The point of this little editorial: The WRTL ads are serious important speech, whereas goofy student speech is not. With that as preview, it's not hard to guess the results.

foreign policy

It's really foreign to me, how we can send our best and brightest to die (3562 as of today) in some failed state halfway around the world. More and more I think back to the days of my youth, and remember what 'they' said about 'Nam. The new Foreign Policy quotes a CIA memo from the Viet Nam War, with Iraq substituted for VN, and the results are scary.

1. At some stage in most debates about the Vietnam IRAQ war, questions like the following emerge: What would it actually mean for the US if it failed to achieve its stated objectives in Vietnam IRAQ? Are our vital interests in fact involved? Would abandonment of the effort really generate other serious dangers?

34. A more challenging question is whether the Soviets IRANIANS might not make a reappraisal of American power which would tempt them into rashly aggressive moves.

37. We doubt, however, that such impulses would result in a much more widespread and serious Communist insurgency TERRORIST problem than would obtain in any case, either in Latin America THE MIDDLE EAST or elsewhere. If Communists JIHADISTS in some countries temporarily acquired more will to fight, the odds for or against success for such ventures in any particular national setting would remain essentially the same.

In the aftermath of that setback (Tet offensive), Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, was replaced and American strategy shifted from conventional operations to counterinsurgency. In many ways, the shift in strategy came too late to alter the outcome of the war. Thirty thousand additional American troops were killed in Vietnam before the United States finally withdrew.

So what will happen in Iraq (or here) that will finally drive home the fact that we must leave without 'winning' before losing 30,000 more young men and women.

summer photos

Bracken Bat Cave, the Gorge at Canyon Lake, big bugs, dinosaur footprints, baseball, football stadiums, and tennis. Bonus: blueberries from Nacogdoches, Texas.

Wimbledon

The Lawn Tennis Championship Meeting starts tomorrow!

Africa's Geographic Destiny

Common sense tells us that access to sea/river ports and generally flat terrain make for a better economy, thanks to better trading opportunities. According to this theory, Bolivia, Mali, and Kyrgyzstan all suffer from their landlocked status. Now a paper by Nathan Nunn & Diego Puga counts the mixed blessings of bad geography for Africa: coastal areas were devasted by the slave trade, while rugged inland areas, where Africans fled, have persisted as pockets of dire poverty.
A shorter version is available here:

For African people fleeing this slave trade over the centuries, rugged terrain was a positive advantage. Enslavement often took place through raids by one group on another, and hills and mountains provided plenty of lookout posts and hiding places (caves, for example) for those trying to escape. In general, countries with flatter, more passable terrain lost more of their population to the traders.

Today, however, that same geographical ruggedness is an economic handicap, making it expensive to transport goods to port; raising the cost of irrigating and farming the land; and simply making it more expensive to do business. This contemporary effect of geography applies across the world: in general, mountains are not good for growth.

Conclusion?

The impacts of geography on economic development are therefore complex and long-lasting. Some economists, such as Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, have suggested increased aid flows and investment could help to overcome the contemporary handicaps created by geography; but the existence of the longer-term, indirect effects revealed in this paper suggest this may not be enough to level the economic playing field.

Sustainability

That was the theme of this year's geography camp, and the subject, in a round-about way, of an editorial in the NYT. Every Christmas for the past 107 years the Audubon Society has been counting birds around the country and world. The results of this survey, as well as other research, document the dramatic decline in bird numbers during the past 40 years.
From the editorial:

Environmentalists of every stripe argue that we must somehow begin to correlate our economic behavior — by which I mean every aspect of it: production, consumption, habitation — with the welfare of other species.

This is the premise of sustainability. But the very foundation of our economic interests is self-interest, and in the survival of other species we see way too little self to care.

In the Washington Post was a piece about kids not wanting to play outside any more, and I think that goes along with the decline in species, global warming, and all our other ills - we are way too removed from our roots, and nothing good can come from it.

My own theory is that ADD is caused by lack of sunlight and having no windows in classrooms. Every school I attended had large windows in the classrooms, and there was plenty of natural light. When it got boring in class you could stare out the window and daydream instead of poking the kid next to you.

I'm sure that's not really true, but still, I don't remember lots of kids with what we now call ADD. I do remember staring out the windows a lot.

How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.

Taking the fall for Abu Ghraib, as Seymour Hersch reports in the NYT today.